Who can you blame when you get hacked?
The cloud is a tricky place to put your information, pictures or other things you consider private.
Turns out, every major cloud storage service — Dropbox, Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive and so on — all use the “mutual responsibility model” in their terms of service. This means if you give away your credentials, then the cloud service provider cannot be held accountable if you get hacked.
“They count anything,” says Ben Johnson, host of Marketplace Tech. “Even if you don’t know that you are giving it away. So if you get phished, or if someone gets you to click on something and they hack into your computer or your phone, that counts as ‘willingly giving it away.’”
With those terms of service, you might need to compromise some privacy for the convenience of using any cloud storage. Or, like Kai, you can turn the setting off altogether.
Listen to the Kai Ryssdal’s full conversation with Ben Johnson in the audio player above.
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